Advice To Canada's Politicians Now Using The Komagata Maru Incident To Get Votes: Do Your Homework

Dan Murray

Hello Brown Princess:

The general historical point is that Japanese cheap labourers were entering Canada in large numbers in 1907 and displacing labourers already here. Many Canadian labourers had families to support and could not compete with the low wages that the Japanese were prepared to accept. The Japanese labourers were mostly single young men who came to Canada primarily to acquire enough money to buy land in Japan. After they had accumulated this money, they intended to leave Canada.

Many labourers already here suffered from the Japanese inflow, as they had suffered from the cheap Chinese labourer inflow. A number were forced by these economic circumstances to leave British Columbia. Some went back to other parts of Canada and some left for the U.S.

Here are a few additional things to remember:

(1) The Japanese labourers who came here received wages 10 times higher than the wages they received in Japan.

(2) The Chinese labourers who came here received wages 20 times the wages they received in China.

(3) The East Indian labourers who came here received wages 50 times the wages they received in India.

It should not have to be said that a country's immigration policy should be directed towards the benefit of its own people. Contrary to what a number of ethnic groups in Canada now seem to think, the staggering numbers of the poor in the world mean that immigration policy cannot possibly be used to solve poverty in other parts of the world.

Here is a question for you:

Could the Canadian labourers who lost their jobs to the cheap labourers who came here expect to go to Japan, China and India to get jobs? Obviously not.

Canada enacted a law (requiring passengers to travel on ships which left the country of the passengers' origin) primarily in order to stop an inflow of Japanese cheap labour which had arrived here in 1907 from Hawaii (against the wishes of the Japanese government). Through talks with the Japanese government, it also tried to deal with a simultaneous, underhanded arrival of Japanese labourers from Japan. Both efforts were "Canadian Workers First" statements and they were intended to solve unemployment and poverty in Canada's own population.

The people who assembled the labourers aboard the Komagata Maru were challenging the right of the Canadian government to look out for the interests of its own people. They received an appropriate response--the same that should have been offered by any other country to any group that tried to do something similar.